HD Heads-Up: May 12
May 12, 2016 
7 Comments
TV3 will screen the network movie premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug on May 22. Given the Lord of the Rings trilogy aired on TV2, and one of the production houses is Warner Bros-owned New Line Cinema, how did TV3 score the free-to-air rights to The Hobbit? Turns out it picked up the trilogy through a package deal with another of the movie’s backers, MGM. Smaug isn’t the network’s only FTA movie premiere that week: it also has Endless Love (8.45 Saturday) and Bad Neighbours (8.30 Monday) …
Other coming HD attractions in the week starting May 21 include: Aliens in the Attic (TV3, 7.00 Saturday), Bad Boys 2 (TV2, 8.45 Saturday), The Virginity Hit (TV2, 11.30 Saturday), The King’s Speech (TV One, 11.50 Saturday), Killers (TV2, 8.45 Sunday), Wolf Creek 2 (TV2, 10.35 Sunday), Lincoln (TV3, 11.30 Sunday), Oblivion (TV3, 8.30 Wednesday) and Stand Up Guys (Prime, 9.30 Friday) …
A raft of HD series end their seasons in the last week of May, including Code Black, Coast NZ, Forensics NZ, Grantchester, Death in Paradise, Mom, How to Get Away With Murder, Arrow and Empire. No word on what will replace these but Rush Hour would make a good post-Empire stablemate for TV2’s Quantico while TV One could be poised to roll out its six-part Hillary drama to succeed Coast NZ …
New that week in HD will be the Channel 5 series, Secret Life of Pets (TV One, 8.00 Wednesday), and Long Lost Family (TV3, 8.30 Thursday), in which Kiwis search for lost family members. TV3 will also premiere the Bryan Bruce documentary, World Class? Inside NZ Education – A Special Report (7.30 Tuesday) …
Next week’s 60 Minutes (Prime, 8.30 Monday) will cover: the gruelling story of a six-year-old diagnosed with a brain tumour but whose parents refused chemo and radiotherapy for him; how one of America’s best high school swimmers was given a spot in Harvard’s women’s swim team — only to join the men’s squad as a transgender; and ’80s pop star Cyndi Lauper’s re-emergence on Broadway and as an activist for the poor …
In other programming news of note: The Bachelorette will premiere on TVNZ OnDemand on May 24, Ryan Gosling, Russell Crowe, Jodie Foster and Sir Elton John will guest on May 28’s The Graham Norton Show, and TV One will launch on May 21 Land of the Midnight Sun (9.50 Saturdays), a three-part travelogue that will air in SD despite being acclaimed for its “awesome Arctic landscapes” …
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May 12, 2016 at 12:31 am
YAY, good to see TV3 are screening all three Hobbit movies 🙂
Sorry, Trevor, but it’s only the first two — the third instalment won’t screen as part of this season.
Trevor, I thought you won’t watch movies on FTA due to the ads- or is it only on TV2?
That’s weird Philip, why screen the first two only? I sometimes watch movies on FTA but mostly on Sky or on Blu-ray 🙂
I presume MediaWorks’ broadcast window for Battle of the Five Armies doesn’t kick in until later this year or early next given it was the last in the trilogy to be released (in 2014). Only a handful of movies from then are surfacing now on FTA and I imagine Armies has a longer FTA holdback than most. While it seems strange TV3 would screen the first two back to back but not the third, expect it to re-run them as a curtain-raiser to Armies’ FTA premiere.
That thought went through my mind, Philip, thanks for letting me know 🙂
Thank goodness that I have the three Hobbit movies on Blu-ray. Tried watching the first movie on Sunday and gave up within a minute as the film was shown in the incorrect aspect ratio of 1:78:1 instead of 2:35:1. This meant that a lot of the picture did not show on the screen.